The Penguin Modern series offers a “concentrated hit” of work by some well-known authors, and their 30th selection is The Red Tenda of Bologna by John Berger. It is described as “a dream-like meditation on memory, food, paintings, a fond uncle, and the improbable beauty of Bologna, from the visionary thinker and art critic”…. and that’s a pretty apt description.

Tenda is Italian for curtain or awning, and Berger notes: “All the windows I pass have awnings and all of them are the same colour. Red.” Indeed, they are a ubiquitous sight – readily evident in my own apartment building, three postings below – and the rich red color theme gives Berger an opportunity to riff on the bricks of the Basilica of St. Petronius, the city’s political leanings, and much else besides. He takes us into shops, restaurants and churches, & through the university’s porticoes, offering commentaries about medieval saints, the history of mortadella, and his uncle’s impression of the city: “It’s red, I’ve never seen a red like Bologna’s. Ah! If we knew the secret of that red…. It’s a city to return to, la proxima volta.”
 

Aroma coffee shop

One stop is at a coffee shop in the Via Porta Nuova, very near to the San Francesco sepolcri noted in the posting immediately below. He didn’t name the shop, but I figured it must be Aroma….. and the proprietress confirmed my hunch. Berger noted the wide range of coffees available, and went straight for the Blue Mountain coffee from Jamaica. That, of course, rang very true for me, taking me back to my time teaching at the University of the West Indies’ Mona campus in Kingston. Berger wrote how the shop locked up the Blue Mountain coffee in the safe every evening, along with the day’s bank notes…. and how its taste lingered for a full fifty minutes, and “keeps the whole brain company.” That Jamaican coffee was not on offer on this visit, but the senior barista showed me on his smartphone the exact valley where the Colombian coffee I savored was grown, at 1700 meters above sea level.

Mary Magdalene

Immediately after leaving the coffee shop, Berger sends readers to Nicolo dell’Arca’s Compianto in the church of Santa Maria della Vita. I had mentioned the power of that particular work in a previous visit, but Berger more properly describes the “hurricane of grief” the artist has sculpted, with Mary Magdalene its “vortex.” He sees in her something more than grief – a determination, an intrepid resolve, something more akin to the strength of purpose evident in Christian martyrs.